Laundry Room Makeover (plus a giveaway for 3 gallons of Behr paint!)

This post sponsored by Behr paint. All opinions expressed are solely mine.

Oh I am SOOO excited to share this makeover with you today! Yes, my laundry room has undergone a pretty major makeover over the last few weeks including new paint, removing wallpaper, installing wood shelving and a cabinet, and all new décor. It is beautiful and very functional!

And make sure to read all the way to the end to enter a giveaway where 4 lucky winners will win 3 gallons of Behr paint to work on their own room makeover!

But I do have to preface this with two things – #1- this room has NO natural light, the hallway in front of it has no natural light – in fact I don’t think one ray of sunshine ever has entered this room. So excuse the pictures with the lights on and my very lacking photography skills in such circumstances. The pictures make me cringe a bit and I wish you could just come see it in person because it looks SO much better! And #2 – this makeover was probably the most difficult makeover I have done when it came to things going wrong and how I had planned. I LOVE the after but this was not at all what I imagined when I planned on fixing up my laundry room. More on that later.

First let’s step back in time – this is how my laundry room looked like before 2010. That is Classic Taupe by Behr on the walls – yep, I have loved and used Behr paint for years! You can see my laundry room tour post here.

Our washing machine died in 2010 and while I waited on the delivery I went ahead and painted and fixed up this room. A quart of yellow paint (sorry the can is long gone and I don’t know the color), a used chair rail that I wrangled to fit, and some beadboard wallpaper and décor fixed it up. Yes that is beadboard wallpaper. This is a cheaper version I found on clearance someplace and I wasn’t impressed with how it held up.

Not much changed over the years except some small décor changes and a little better organization.

But I always wanted to install cabinets in here to replace that wire shelving. I knew it would add so much more storage, hidden storage at that, and just completely upgrade the look of the room. I added measurements of the room and space where the cabinets could go to my phone and looked for over a year for used cabinets at Habitat stores, thrift stores, Craigslist, and yard sales.

Meanwhile… the beadboard wallpaper had not held up well. It has sort of a “foamy” feel to it and if it was every bumped with a textured or sharp object it would tear and knick.

And that chair rail I put it up – well it was in my VERY beginning stages of DIY and was warped so I just used screws to install it. Aghh – so unprofessional looking!

So here’s the before…

And here’s the after!!

I painted the room with one of the Behr 2016 Color Trend colors called Bowstring (T16-19) in Behr Premium Plus Ultra in Eggshell. It is a light taupe color. In this room with no natural light it tends to look a bit darker and a bit more on the gray side. But I painted a sample in a bedroom and it was more of a creamy very light taupe. So definitely try it in your room first but for this room with no windows it was PERFECT for the light taupe/gray color I was wanting.

I started by removing all the wallpaper and the chair rail. My original plan was to paint the upper half of the walls with Bowstring by Behr and then install board and batten trim cut from MDF on the bottom half. Well… even though many Pinterest tutorials I read stated that Home Depot or Lowe’s would cut MDF into 2 inch strips they don’t. And I don’t have a table saw which made my attempts at cutting MDF into perfectly straight strips a huge mess. Of course I discovered this AFTER I had already painted 2 coats of Bowstring paint on the top of the walls, and 2 coats of white paint on the bottom half.

So I nixed the board and batten trim idea and repainted the bottom part of the wall for the 3rd time with Bowstring paint so that the room was one color from floor to ceiling.

So next was the cabinets – my original plan was to find 2 cabinets to install on either side of the room and add floating shelving in between. But I looked and looked for cabinets and never could find any in the size I needed plus under $50. Until I found this cabinet for $4.00 – yes, $4 at Goodwill in Charleston! It is a laminate cabinet which wasn’t exactly what I was wanting but it was in great condition and I thought I could make it work. I flipped it upside down so the handles would be at the bottom and it was perfect.

Painting a shiny laminate cabinet is NO fun – yes I did lightly sand it and I probably should have used a separate primer but I didn’t have one on hand. So I just painted several coats of white paint (I just always use Behr Ultra in Semi Gloss in Ultra Pure White) and eventually it was covered well after some scary moments of wondering

For the shelving part I just did MDF floating shelves on 1×2’s screwed into studs in the wall. I fronted the MDF shelves with primed lattice strips to make them look thick.

All that was in the room was a bare bulb hanging from an open light fixture. The glass globe had fallen and broken at some point and we had never replaced it. I had picked up this small chandelier a few months back at Value Village hoping to use it either in here or in another room. I think it was $4.04?

A coat of oil rubbed bronze spray paint turned it into this! And YES, I have a chandelier in my laundry room! If I could find a fancier small one for $5-10 I would totally have installed it in here too. I LOVE making rooms beautiful and fun – especially when I can do it on a budget – so why not have a chandelier in the laundry room? :)

Now let’s talk about storage. Oh, the storage! I store all my toilet paper, paper towels, Kleenex boxes in here along with laundry supplies. Both of the brown baskets are filled with toilet paper and more baskets hold rags and lost socks.

Everything I had in the laundry room on that wire shelf fit back in here and look even room to spare in this cabinet! I stock up on laundry detergent when I get it on it’s lowest sale price. By the way, I owe you an “why I don’t use homemade laundry detergent” post soon.

I LOVE having the detergent I am currently using in a dispenser on the shelf right above my washer. I have been wanting to do that for a long time. I just keep the little glass cup I use to measure it in the cabinet and if any drips on the washer, I just wipe it up with some of the clothes waiting to be washed.

As for the décor – if you are thinking, wow, she must have raided Home Goods and spent a fortune! Nope! I guess being a yard sale décor finds hoarder pays off sometimes.

The only things I purchased were the rug (Mainstays line at Wal-mart), the large coral/navy art print (Ross) and the black lined baskets (Better Homes and Garden line at Wal-mart). I had everything else including that adorable coral Target tray that I found a few weeks back at Goodwill and planned to spray paint (so glad I didn’t!). I did spray paint several other thrifted items from my stash– a lamp, a small bird, and a candlestick to fit my color scheme.

And by the way I didn’t originally intend on using these colors at all – I was going to use gray/taupe on the walls and either teal or coral/mint green as my accents. But when I saw that rug at Walmart and found the art at Ross and my color scheme turned to coral and navy and I LOVE it.

Now let’s talk about that art piece. I had seen so many cute laundry signs at the beginning of the year when everyone was on a purging/organizing kick and redecorating their laundry rooms and planned to find one in my colors when I worked on this room. But when I saw this one at Ross – I realized it was perfect! I could have bought some kind of sign that says “Laundry is loads and loads of fun” or another one of those sayings like that. I am not sure that anyone would say that laundry is fun – and it can be the most dreaded household chore for a lot of people – while I don’t hate it, I certainly don’t enjoy it. But you know what – if I didn’t do laundry my husband would have no clean clothes to wear to work to provide for our family, my nieces and nephew wouldn’t have clean clothes to wear to school, my house would stink, and there would be piles everywhere. So if I view the mundane, not very fun job of doing “loads and loads” of laundry as showing LOVE to them, as serving my family – it changes my perspective just a bit. So this was the perfect piece of art to hang in my laundry room, the colors were perfect, and it will be a great reminder to me as I see it throughout the day. The tutorial for the clothespin wreath can be found here.

My ironing board hangs on the back of the door and this view of the room is probably the truest representation of the paint color.

I need to add a picture in the frame – but I just love this little arrangement on this tray!

I moved my empty hangars to this white rack on this side where I hang dry wet clothes to dry and hang dry clothes before taking to our closets.

And if you are asking where are the dirty clothes? Well, I do have a basket full in my room that I need to catch up on from when this room was out of commission for a few days, BUT we usually just throw them in that basket (or honestly on the floor in front of washer) throughout the day. I still follow this method of doing a load of laundry a day so that my laundry always stays kept up. I collect my whites in that basket and do 1 load of whites as one of my days of laundry each week. I may keep a basket of clean clothes in my room waiting to be folded more often than I should/or want, but dirty clothes are pretty much washed right away (once I have a full load) so they don’t pile up.

I am just so happy with how this room turned out! I don’t know about you but making a room look pretty and clean is so motivating to keep it that way! Even though the process didn’t go smooth and the after isn’t what I had originally imagined, I am so glad it turned out like this! I think the same color paint from floor to ceiling along with adding the shelving has made this room look and feel so much bigger.

My total budget for the room came in at about $60. I had the MDF pieces already leftover from another project, I bought 3 1×2’s and the lattice trim for the front of the shelves (about $15), the $4 cabinet, $4 light fixture, $20 rug, $20 baskets and art, Behr provided the paint, and everything else I already had.

Now excuse me while I go put this room to good use doing some laundry! :)

I am joining a 18 other bloggers posting projects using the Behr 2016 Color Trends paint colors – so make sure to check out what color they chose and project they did!

And 4 lucky winners will win 3 gallons each of some of the Color Trends paint colors so make sure to enter below in the giveaway widget below. Giveaway closes on Wednesday, September 30th at 11:59pm PST.

I just want to say that your laundry room makeover is such an inspiration to me. My laundry room is also my mudroom and I have those awful wire shelves above my washer and dryer and thought I would be clever and use large baskets to hold all my detergents and whatnot …let’s just say it just looks cluttered and not functional at all. I love the color Bowstring T16-19 that you chose for the walls, it is a nice neutral but still warms the room nicely. Wish me luck I am now going to start reconfiguring my laundry room as well.

What a lovely laundry room. Really impressed with those cabinets and chandelier finds!
So visually pleasing without the clutter. The eye is now naturally drawn to the art and the other decor accents.Laundry Shoppe recently posted..A Laundry Secret Revealed

I love this! This is my kind of DIY on a budget. We live in a 100 year old house needing to be updated. I literally hate this house and have no inspiration to do anything to it. I’m praying for a job transfer so we can sell it to someone who has the inspiration and love for older houses. Although, I love this paint color and could see it on my walls.

So glad to see a laundry room make over where the laundry room is not the size of my house. My laundry room area is about the same size as yours and I can see potential in mine now. Thank you so much for sharing.

I have heard that the better brands (like Graham Brown) holds up much better. I had a friend use it in the main areas of her home and she said it held up great. This was a cheaper version that I found on clearance at Lowe’s or Home Depot years ago that they don’t even carry anymore. So I can’t pass judgment on those better brands. In fact I may even try some Graham and Brown wallpaper one day to see how it compares.

Your laundry room looks awesome and I love that you put a chandelier in there! It also looks so much brighter, and the fact that you added so much storage, organization and decor on a budget is amazing! I used Bowstring in our dining room and then actually painted our breakfast nook yesterday and it’s made a HUGE difference in bringing more natural light to the space, yay!Katie @ Upcycled Treasures recently posted..30 Handmade Halloween Costume Ideas

I love the makeover-especially the chandelier and the sign that says, “Let all you do be done in love”. I like your reasoning behind the quote and how you put it in your laundry room. I think I need that same reminder in mine.